Henry David Thoreau

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

You should always own a black dress because no one ever remembers a black dress.

Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

You don’t create things, you discover things.

Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon

To inherit property is not to be born – it is to be still-born, rather.

Sir, I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

The future is purchased by the present.